I'm wanting to know what, besides slavery, contributed to the american civil war. I feel like we aren't being given a factual history of these events and text books are so watered down, it's hard to get a grasp of the full picture. For reference, I'm 24 now, and graduated high school back in 2012. What were the prevailing religious beliefs of the time, and were they being threatened? What was the immigration like back then, and was it increasing or decreasing at the time the Civil War began? Did everyday people generally support it, or was it primarily government backed? In addition, what was the final "tipping point" for the fighting to begin and war officially declared? I hope this isn't too broad of a topic for me to ask about, but it's been bothering me for a while. Certain coworkers of mine desperately need a history lesson, and the grasp they have on this particular topic is elementary at best. I would like to explain things to them, but I want a more complete understanding first to make sure I'm not making things worse. Thank you in advance for your help!
This gets asked here a lot. The cause of the war was slavery.
As jschooltiger says, the question is asked here a lot. As a Southerner, I also recognize a familiar variant of it in your post, which is: isn't there anything other than slavery that we can say caused the Civil War? The search for such an answer occupied many Southerners from the end of the War until relatively recently, and though it produced a lot of writing ( including memoirs written by ex-Confederate officers) on what's now called The Lost Cause, it didn't really ever produce a good answer, because ( as you'd read in jschooltiger's link), the answer is no. There isn't.
You ask about prevailing religious beliefs. The mainstream denominations in the US wrestled with doctrinal questions then as well as now, but they also wrestled over the issue of abolition, and it was that, that split many of them on regional lines. The Presbyterians in the earlier 19th c. began to separate into Old School and New School, as some members began to want to leave the grim and gloomy Calvinist preaching on sin and guilt, and emphasize something more uplifting. There was something of a split in 1838 between them, but as the New School also embraced abolition of slavery, it was the Old School churches which predominated in the South. and in 1861 the Civil War created the real split into the Northern and Southern Presbyterian Churches. The issue of slavery and abolition also split the Methodist church into North and South, in 1844, and the Baptists split over it in 1845. The Lutherans, Catholics and Episcopalians tried resolutely to simply avoid the issue: which is to say, they didn't oppose slavery . Some excused it as biblical, would say that slavery existed in the Old Testament. Some would treat it as a kind of "render unto Caesar" matter, having to do with government and economy , and not human salvation. But in all cases, different doctrinal beliefs between North and Southern churches did not cause the War. The question of slavery and the abolition of it instead caused the deepest divisions between northern and southern congregations, just as it did in the country.
Another issue the Lost Cause writers tried to make important was the question of tariffs. The North had manufacturing industries that feared competition from Britain and Europe, which had cheaper labor and so lower costs. They wanted high tariffs to shield them. The South had a booming export economy of cotton, especially to England, little industry, and wanted lower tariffs- they didn't want to subsidize Northern factories. However, the level of tariffs was negotiable. It could be bargained over, traded around, and it was. One definition of a good politician is someone who can divide a pizza between seven people, each of whom wants a third, and make them all happy. The level of the tariff would rise and fall throughout the antebellum period, depending on who was in power. But slavery was much more difficult to bargain over. Bargains were improvised, territorial limits tried : but slavery imposed two different sets of laws for human beings on one country and that was never going to work. After the Dredd Scott decision essentially decreed slavery had to exist everywhere, compromises were impossible.